An ongoing review of politics and culture

Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? is receiving a lot of attention, and most of the comments I have seen online are, unsurprisingly, negative. They tend to fall into two general camps: the first one claims that our online lives are making us smarter, not dumber, while the second one concedes that there may be problems but insists that we’ll innovate our way out of them. There’s a representative discussion, with unfortunately brief responses from some smart people, at Edge and there are more detailed responses at the Britannica Blog.

I don’t think I can summarize my thoughts on these matters here; they are very much mixed, and I’m still trying to sort them out (and may well be doing so for the rest of my life). But I do have some questions that I wish I could make all Carr’s respondents answer. They derive from what I think is the key paragraph in Carr’s essay, the one that explains why he wrote the essay in the first place:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

So my question for Carr’s respondents is this: Have you had a similar experience? If so, does the change in your concentration abilities bother you? To what do you attribute it? And if you haven’t had Carr’s experience, why do you think you have escaped?

I think it’s interesting that not one of the respondents to Carr that I’ve seen admits to having had such an experience (Danny Hillis comes closest), or even addresses the question — except for Larry Sanger, who says, charitably, that Carr’s problem is “ultimately a problem of will, a failure to choose to think. If that is a problem of yours, you have no one to blame for it but yourself.” I think we are supposed to infer from this that Sanger is impervious to such diminishments, but he doesn’t really say that, does he? I’d like to put the question directly to him, and to all the others.

(P.S. This will be my last post for a couple of weeks, as I am off to visit my family in Alabama and will not be bringing my laptop. This is not as ascetic a move as it may sound, since I will have my iPhone, but I won’t be posting and will be striving to recapture my diminishing powers of long-term concentration.)

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I wonder if some of the respondents have not ever had that experience, simply because they have never attempted to engage a lengthy piece. Or for the young, perhaps they have never engaged a lengthy piece with a mind unaltered by cyber-habits, so they have no contrasting experience by which to measure their distraction. To them, long pieces just seem inherently boring and hard to follow.

It is more likely for Atlantic readers to have the requisite experience to judge his point, but for the wider public, I’ve little doubt that the brevity and speed of Internet reading cause most people to never gain the discipline to engage lengthy works to begin with. I expect that a smaller proportion of readers is learning to concentrate at length, given the apparent wealth of information (or at least distraction) now available in brief chunks.

I think this represents a major transformation of literacy, and a weakening of a certain very useful type of literacy in favor of what I believe to be a less useful one (at least when it comes to sustaining civilization).

I have suspected for a long time that there is something about the internet as a medium that inculcates certain habits of mind that are inimical to certain critical thinking skills, and that book-reading inculcates a completely different mental skill set than internet reading.

I came of age in a pre-internet era, and I continue to read novels, even very long novels, to this day. I admit that I have experienced symptoms similar to Carr’s. I had never connected these symptoms to my internet habit until I read Carr’s essay, but his hypothesis does seem plausible.

My greatest concern is for younger generations who will never develop the book-reading mental skills. I firmly believe that a habit of following long, complex arguments or plots creates a different mind than a habit of getting shotgunned with factoids.

I’m one of the optimists, unabashedly. And I belong in the two camps you mention: I think online makes us smarter, not dumber, and if there are some cases where it makes us dumber, we’ll innovate our way out of it.

As to your question… Mmmneh. Maybe. I definitely remember that as a child I could just dive into a book and not let go of it until I’d reached the other cover. I don’t do that that often these days. But I suspect it has as much to do with the fact that I’m no longer a schoolboy, with more pressing activities, as with the internet. But it still happens. In fact, the last book that I’ve completely lost myself in for a couple days until I was done with it was GNP.

Why do I think I have escaped? I don’t know. I don’t agree with your terminology: to say I have “escaped” this phenomenon implies that it is the norm, and that only a lucky few mysteriously elude it. I believe the opposite is true. Why was Carr not lifted with the rising information tide?

Why do some people get air sick and others don’t? More importantly, does the fact that some people get air sick mean airplanes are bad for us?

That’s what I was wondering, Steve — would Carr (and I!) be having the same lessening of concentration at our age even if the internet had never been invented? There’s a history of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers who do their best work (work that requires intense concentration) early in their careers and lose the stamina to do that kind of work later on.

PEG, I hear you, but a young whippersnapper like you who grew up (largely) in the Online Era doesn’t have the comparative experience that we old farts do. We remember life Before Web. Well, we just barely remember it, because our memories are fading.

I agree with him. The more time I spend surfing the internet or cable, the harder it is to finish a book. That was one reason I quit blogging. During the two years (or so) I blogged, I hardly finished a book. Now I’m able to read again.

Not as such. I still read long hard books piecemeal (Bowle’s Microeconomics), and short entertaining books in one setting (William’s Implied Spaces). It isn’t any harder for me to focus on these texts. In fact I think I can process them better than I used to (see more in them) but that’s probably because I have more practice.

However I spend less time reading books, and also papers (in number of words, I encounter more papers I might read than books). This is simply because there’s more to spread my finite attention over. I find myself thinking more about how to manage my finite reading time.

If so, does the change in your concentration abilities bother you?

It would bother me a lot if I experienced such a change. I have had temporary endocrine problems that disrupted my concentration and I hated the feeling.

If you haven’t had Carr’s experience, why do you think you have escaped?

I don’t yet consider that we have adequate evidence that there’s a phenomenon for me to “escape”. Anecdotal reactions in this kind of domain are notoriously poor evidence for a valid phenomenon.

However that said, there are obviously huge differences in individual attentional control / modulation. So maybe my style of attentional control just isn’t very susceptible to Carr’s problem. This could be biological, or habits, or more likely some combination.

My own observations in this domain are that I read relatively carefully in a given intellectual “genre” that interests me until I gradually get a good sense of how writers organize the issues, and then I tend to skim more and more. Eventually I either tune out entirely or become very selective in what I read. It sometimes takes several years for me to get a good grip on a domain.

This pattern is pretty much the same online and with physical books and research papers. It is different with pure entertainment books, which is more like dancing to music — I read them to get guided through a given sequence of emotional states, though of course they also sometimes give me ideas.

Specifically with respect to Nick Carr, I read him for a while (maybe 18 months) but it got so I could predict him so well that I stopped.

Also, since a number of comments reference age: I do think there is an age effect. Probably people who encountered Google and blogging when they were young haven’t had a chance to overlearn attentional skills as much as us old fogies. I spent thirty-five years reading heavy stuff before blogging arrived (though Usenet could be pretty distracting too).

For me, the internet replaced TV and magazines a lot more than it replaced books. I cancelled my TIME and FIRSTTHINGS subscriptions and read that kind of thing online, and I watch a whole lot less TV, but I still read about the same number of books.

And surely the effects of TV on the ability to read deeply are so much greater than the effects of the internet as to make the internet hardly worth worrying about.

I also just ran across this comment arguing that ready access to information via the internet can improve our memory and concentration:

The availability of Wikipedia and search engines has resulted in being able to remember more information because it’s so easily refreshed in passing. Can’t remember whether that rebellion was 16th or 17th century? Quick Wikipedia check, ah it was 16th, that fact now refreshed in my memory and ready for new connections.

Pre-Internet, well: 16th or 17th? Hmm. No idea. I guess I could look it up, but that seems like a lot of work. So I’ll just keep letting that memory fade away, vaguer and vaguer.

And because of the variety of subjects I wind up covering in a typical dig through Wikipedia (and usually Google & Amazon & sometimes Flickr too, for more background or books), the amount of interconnected stuff that’s been recently in memory is much larger than it would be if I had to go to the library to find a set of books on a subject, and then wind up running around in the library trying to find the connections. The interconnections are key to having some novel thoughts on the subject, and the fact that you can know those connections without great effort helps you fit your own thoughts into the pattern. It’s not just a set of disconnected facts, in other words.

Anyway, point is, I don’t think Wikipedia or the wider Internet makes you stupider. I think it makes you much smarter.
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/010439.html#282894